Marvellous marbling!

At last, this week I have been able to get back to some card-making again! I have sent off the parcel containing my entries for the NAQGCON competitions ... I have finished tidying up and rearranging my craft room following some redecoration work (the roof had been leaking!!) ... and now it feels just like a new beginning!

Last week I came across some copyright-free images of marbled papers (the kind that you find inside the leather-bound covers of old books), courtesy of the Photoshop Roadmap site. It immediately struck me what marvellous backgrounds these would make for quilling, especially when printed at different levels of opacity as I have done on these two cards:

The marbling effect in the first one is just like rippling water, and I managed to get the ripples to flow through from the background (printed at 50% opacity) to the foreground (printed at 100% opacity). Then I added an abstract quilled motif featuring some gold-edged black and metallic-edged blue strips , with a few twists and turns thrown in!

For the second card, I added a quilled embellishment featuring one of my 'cut eccentric coils' made from strips whose colours were chosen to match the marbling. The gold swirl was cut out using a Cuttlebug die, and I've also added a small strip of lace for good measure - not my usual style, perhaps, but I'm really quite pleased with the result.